The Let-Them-Eat-Cake Moment

It’s prob­a­bly a bad thing that Pam and I are both home, watch­ing CNN.

The lat­est stun­ning drop of the Dow Jones Indus­trial Aver­age has us both upset (her more than me, I think). Now, we’re in that ‘Can’t look away from this car crash’ mode.

This morn­ing, we saw the head of Lehman Broth­ers, Richard Fuld, tes­ti­fy­ing to Con­gress. They brought up a slide, detail­ing the nearly 1/2 bil­lion that he made in the last 7 years or so in salary, stock options, and who knows what else. Later, they showed heli­copter fly­overs of 3 of his homes in Florida, Col­orado and Cal­i­for­nia, as well as his $22 mil­lion Man­hat­tan pent­house. I kep think­ing of the line “It’s good to be the King”, said by Mel Brooks when he’s play­ing Louis XVI in ‘His­tory of the World, Part 1″.

How­ever, it was another French­man (or French­woman) who came to mind a bit later in the broad­cast. Wolff Blitzer had a call into Don­ald Trump. He asked the multi-billion dol­lar busi­ness mag­nate, socialite, tele­vi­sion per­son­ality and John McCain sup­porter what Amer­i­cans can do at this point. “Dream”, he said, “Dream of when things will get bet­ter.” He also spoke of how well he was doing, hav­ing closed a deal sell­ing sev­eral prop­er­ties to ‘The Rus­sians’ and chuck­led with Blitzer over the fact that he got his money before their mar­ket tanked as well. Ear­lier in the morn­ing, I saw this comic, thanks to Dar­ren Bare­foot.

Marie Antoinette could not have put it bet­ter, Mon­sieur Trump.

Celebrating the Smoot

Accord­ing to Google’s built-in cal­cu­la­tor func­tions, I’m 1.04477612 smoots tall. And what, you may be ask­ing, is a smoot?

From Wikipedia:

The smoot is a non­stan­dard unit of length cre­ated as part of a Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy (MIT) fra­ter­nity prank. It is named after Oliver R. Smoot (class of 1962), an MIT fra­ter­nity pledge to Lambda Chi Alpha, who in Octo­ber 1958 was used by his fra­ter­nity broth­ers to mea­sure the length of the Har­vard Bridge between Boston and Cam­bridge, Massachusetts.

One smoot is equal to his height (five feet and seven inches ~1.70 m), and the bridge’s length was mea­sured to be 364.4 smoots (620.1 m) plus or minus one ear, with the “plus or minus” intended to express uncer­tainty of mea­sure­ment. Over the years the “or minus” por­tion has gone astray in many cita­tions, includ­ing the com­mem­o­ra­tive plaque at the site itself. Smoot repeat­edly lay down on the bridge, let his com­pan­ions mark his new posi­tion in chalk or paint, and then got up again. Even­tu­ally, he tired from all this exer­cise and was there­after car­ried by the fra­ter­nity broth­ers to each new posi­tion. Every­one walk­ing across the bridge today sees painted mark­ings indi­cat­ing how many smoots there are from where the side­walk begins on the Boston river bank. The marks are repainted each year by the incom­ing asso­ciate mem­ber class (sim­i­lar to pledge class) of Lambda Chi Alpha

This past week­end, smoots and Oliver Smoot were back in the news:

Father of the ‘Smoot’ returns to MIT

By Asso­ci­ated Press | Sat­ur­day, Octo­ber 4, 2008 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Local Coverage

CAMBRIDGE — The father of a unique mea­sure­ment known as the “Smoot” has returned to MIT.

Oliver Smoot was the short­est pledge in the school’s Lambda Chi Alpha fra­ter­nity 50 years ago when they decided to lay him on the Mass­a­chu­setts Avenue Bridge.
They found he mea­sured 5-foot-7 inches, then marked the bridge every five feet and seven inches, deter­min­ing it was 364.4 “Smoots” long. Today, Google’s cal­cu­la­tor func­tion will change any mea­sure­ment into Smoots.

The orig­i­nal Smoot — who later became chair­man of the Amer­i­can National Stan­dards Insti­tute — returned to the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy on Sat­ur­day for “Smoot Cel­e­bra­tion Day.” Smoot spoke and was pre­sented with a plaque, which will be installed on the bridge.

MIT pres­i­dent Susan Hock­field said the plaque will brighten the day for wind­blown pedestrians.

I love the fact that Smoot became chair­man of the Amer­i­can National Stan­dards Insti­tute. Who bet­ter to pre­side over such an orga­ni­za­tion than some­one who is a Stan­dard of Mea­sure himself!

On the half a dozen or so times that I walked on the Mass Ave. bridge, I sur­veyed the Smoot marks like the one in the pic­ture above, and was intrigued by the effect of a half a cen­tury of repaint­ing (the repaint­ing wasn’t always in the same colour!) I heard sto­ries about the Boston police describ­ing the loca­tion of dis­abled vehi­cles on the bridge being ‘near the 200-smoot mark’ or  ‘at the 250^th smoot’. In fact, given how use­ful the smoot marks were, I won­der if it might be a good idea to also mark Vancouver’s bridges of sig­nif­i­cant length (such as the Granville Bridge, here in Van­cou­ver)  in smoots. I’ll bet it would help with traf­fic reports. We could even append some smoot infor­ma­tion at the bot­tom (as a foot­note) of those flags already on the bridges. While the Bur­rard Street Bridge is prob­a­bly not long enough to war­rant ‘smoot cal­i­bra­tion’, the Cam­bie and Lions’ Gate bridges could cer­tainly ben­e­fit from this mea­sure­ment. Even if we got pres­sure from the folks in Boston that only the Mass Ave. bridge could have smoot marks (because they were a bona-fide tourist attrac­tion), I’d counter that there is no such thing as a copy­right or other rights on a unit of measurement.

Per­haps some day in the dis­tant future, peo­ple will won­der why all bridges are mea­sured in smoots, and prob­a­bly assume that it had some­thing to do with road con­struc­tion or the ele­va­tion of bridges above water. After all, mea­sure­ments often have strange his­to­ries. The orig­i­nal def­i­n­i­tion of the inch was the width of a man’s thumb. In the 14^th cen­tury, King Edward II of Eng­land ruled that 1 inch was equal to 3 grains of bar­ley placed length­wise, end to end.